Note: I wrote and posted this work to Facebook on Father’s Day 2020. Although I have many reservations about Facebook these days, and I suspect that “many” may well become “too many” before too long, it is a place of gathering and I depend on it for encouragement and solidarity. Responses come quickly. The news is often timely. The ties that bind are visible and sometimes surprising. Still.

But my first and best online home is still this blog, which I have sadly neglected for all sorts of reasons neither you nor I have the patience for me to recite.

The response to this memoir on Facebook made me think I would do well to reproduce it in an open space. I also know that every post to this good old home keeps the blog from going dark forever.

So another candle in the window, for my father.

I think of my father today, and remember the one place where he was always confident, happy, and full of wonder: his garden. He grew up on a subsistence farm, and worked for the Forest Service before he came to Roanoke for a new life of difficult and often menial physical labor. He complained about many things, and often, but in my hearing he never once complained about the work he had to do to make a living, whether it was grinding centerseals at the N&W shops, or cleaning schools as a day custodian, or, as he once did for a short while, handling what I’m sure were toxic substances in a local biochemical plant.

It always seemed to me that the work he was born to do was farming. I recall hearing him and my mother talking about selling our house, buying some land in Vinton (near Roanoke), and setting up a farm. But someone else would have had to manage it all–my dad was emphatically not a manager–and the idea didn’t last long, though I still remember the conversations.

Later in life, my dad always had a pretty large garden, large enough to hire a horse-driven plow to till the earth at planting time. We ate delicious vegetables from that garden. I thought all vegetables tasted that way until I had to rely on a grocery store, long before groceries had begun to care about better-tasting vegetables. Even today, though, with the right kind of grocery store tomatoes tasting very good indeed, it’s not at all like what my father helped to bring out of the ground.

Neither I nor my brother had any interest in farming, and to this day I’ve never had a garden of my own. But I remember my father in his garden, and I have him on lo-res videocassette explaining his garden to me. I’ve included a still image from that video below.

I’ve also included what to my knowledge is the only letter my father ever wrote me, a postcard he sent to me during the Governor’s School in 1974. He would sometimes jot a note on the bottom of a letter from my mother, but this was unique in being from him only. I was away from home for a month, longer than I’d ever been away, and for our close-knit family it seemed a very long time indeed.

You can see from the handwriting that my father struggled with a tremor pretty much all his adult life. It may have been the result of a bad concussion he suffered as a teen when he stepped out of a moving car, fell and hit his head, and lost consciousness for a few days. Whatever the cause, it was something he dealt with and typically sought to hide as he moved through his life.

My father was a complicated man and sometimes difficult, but he loved his family and he had a strong and fruitful way with the land and its bounty. I’m not sure he ever quite understood the life I ended up pursuing. He did say he hoped to live to see me finish my Ph.D. so he could call me Doctor. I finished in May, 1992, and he died just a few months later.

For those few months he did indeed call me Doctor. And he knew, though I’m not sure either of us recognized its significance, that I had written a dissertation primarily concerned with Paradise Lost and, in particular, a garden planted by God.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.